Since becoming a doula, I've gotten a couple of questions from most of the people I've told. The first is both the hardest and easiest to answer: how did that happen? For people who've known me a while in particular, it seems like I've jumped around between jobs and career paths sort of haphazardly, and sometimes I even question myself about it. Ultimately, though, I think I've gotten here through a path that makes total sense to me. I wrote about this once before, so I won't go into great detail, but the basic gist is this: In order to make the kind of difference I've always wanted to make, I think I needed to take the long path. The road that started with an idealistic teenager who "loved humanity" but hadn't yet figured out how to relate to actual people, went through the disillusionment of realizing that it means nothing to love the idea of humanity if you can't also love smelly, rude, individual people, crossed over the chasm into my own community and its resources, and eventually landed here in this place where I do what I think is a whole lot of good for one family at a time. When you track from "political science/philosophy/history" to "libraries" to "birth work," it doesn't seem logical, but when you follow the path I actually followed and ignore the labels for a minute, I don't think it seems quite that haphazard anymore.

For people who've never met a doula before or known anyone who's had one, the concept is vague and bubbly, and the truth is that the reality is kind of vague and bubbly, too. The stereotypes of doulas actually vary pretty widely by region, and if your area only has a small number of doulas, your perception is probably coloured by the kind of doula-ing they do and the kind of people they are. In Toronto, there are so many doulas with so many backgrounds that you really can find a doula to suit just about any birth and any family. The fact is that there's a short list of things parents can expect from just about every doula, things like "birth planning" and "comfort measures" and "postpartum support," but what that means for individuals covers a huge range. Doulas come from all backgrounds and serve all kinds of families, and even a single doula might do a different kind of work for one family than she does for another, based on their needs.

"So what do you do?" is a different question. I'm a troubleshooter, I'm a listener, I'm a backrub-er, I'm a breastfeeding assistant, I'm a person who reminds you to pee when your labour stalls. I'm a cook and a housekeeper and a nanny. I'm also a businesswoman (which is a shocker for me), a networker, and a community-builder.

As a job, my doula work has two parts: what I do for clients, and what I do for my business. Client work starts with finding them--making connections, advertising, getting referrals, and so on. Once I've made a connection, I schedule a consultation, which usually takes about an hour of preparation and up to an hour of meeting time. At that consultation, we talk about what their plans are and what they hope to gain by working with me, which varies pretty widely within the scope of what I can do. If they decide to hire me, I go into the next phase of work, which involves researching anything that's new to me (any aspect of their plans for birth, from their care provider to their planned coping techniques), getting my schedule set up for going on-call, and planning. Sometimes I'll shadow a prenatal class or read a specific book to ensure I am, at minimum, as well-versed as the clients on a particular method.

Two weeks before the client's due date, I go on-call, which is a big shift in our lives. During my on-call time, I make no inflexible plans, and I make no plans that would put me somewhere I couldn't leave quickly. I make sure that I'm not going to need more than 90 minutes to get to the client's home or birthing location, and they become my number-one time priority. This sometimes means other things fall by the wayside--our meals become simpler, I buy bread instead of making my own, and I don't start projects that can't be abandoned partway through if necessary. I don't take any medication that would make me too drowsy to get up in the middle of the night, and I make sure I'm keeping a decent sleep schedule so I'm always as rested as possible. If I'm tired enough that I know I won't be able to be awake and working for 30 more hours if I need to, I take a nap. I always have to be ready to go. During this time I'm also keeping in frequent contact with the clients, touching base after their appointments and calling at least once a week, answering their e-mails and staying available for questions or worries about any part of the process.

I'm on-call until they call me to go join them, which is usually at around the start of active labour but may be sooner, depending on how well they're coping. From the point I join them, I'm pretty much there indefinitely, up to two hours after the birth of their baby. Graham shifts into taking care of the things at home I usually do--food, walking the dogs, and so on--for as long as it takes. Graham is very much part of my business, because it wouldn't be possible to be away from home the way I am without him here. I've had a birth that lasted three hours and one that lasted almost 48, and while normally they're somewhere in-between, we're both very aware that either can happen. In the latter case, my recovery time extends at least another day, sometimes longer, before I'm really back in full-swing and we can re-establish our lives.

After births, I'm still working with clients for about six weeks. During the first week, I go and visit them and see how things are going (usually on about the third day, when the dreaded hormone crash rolls around), and that visit plus postpartum help--up to eight total hours--distributed through the first six weeks are part of my package. That time might include feeding assistance or just listening, or housekeeping, preparing a meal, or giving people a chance to rest. I'm also still doing research, answering questions by phone and e-mail, and checking in regularly (at least once a week by phone).

Whether I have a client or not, though, I'm still doing quite a bit of work. I'm managing my website, keeping up on trends, news and new research in obstetrics and maternity care, reading books, attending training in basic doula care as well as advanced techniques for comfort or further certification, doing observations of prenatal or parenting classes in the community, making connections with local resources, networking with other doulas, and seeking new ways to find clients.

Basically, what it means for me is that I have a job, and I'm doing--like most people--quite a bit more work than I'm being paid for. It also means that, because of the nature of my work, my entire family is involved in pretty much all of it. This job has changed our lives in lots of ways, and luckily we're both mostly enjoying it, because if Graham weren't sold on it all 100%, it would be a lot harder to manage.

I've been blocking myself from writing because I felt like I didn't have anything to say, but that's so far from what I intended to do with this space, after all.

I can't talk about work much, with much detail at all, because the nature of the beast means it's all confidential and for good reason. Anything even remotely identifying is pretty much off the table, at least in terms of writing it out for an uncontrollable audience. This has been hard for me, both as a chronic overshare-er and because writing online in various ways is my primary way of keeping most of the people I care about in the loop of my life. In trying not to say too much, I've had to default to saying nothing, and that's not ideal. Now that things are getting underway a bit more, I'm having an easier time talking about what I'm doing, and how I feel about it, rather than having to rely on details about other people's lives to describe it. It's still complex and full of rocks, but it's getting a little bit easier to balance it.

I can say that I've been working quite a bit. I haven't had a ton of clients, but between the preparatory work and the follow-up work and the paperwork and the networking and the professional development and the marketing, I'm keeping busy. It's coming out to about a half-time job right now, which is a change. And I've officially been paid, which feels better than I expected. I haven't made a dollar of my own money since early 2011, so it was a little bit thrilling.

We went out with Graham's lab last night and I even got to open our tab under my name and close it myself, which I've possibly never done before. Not that it's a major goal of my life or anything, but it felt nice to be able to give something. Graham's never had a moment's hesitation about being the sole breadwinner and has always been more than willing to continue doing that indefinitely, and I've had a lot of time to get past any guilt I might have once had about that situation, but it still feels nice to have a little bit to pitch in here and there.

Hobbes and Molly are slowly adjusting to my being gone more often. They do ok, but Hobbes has gotten much more dependent on Molly's presence and doesn't like to be separated from her at all. Better her than me, I suppose, but it's just not so much an improvement for him as it is a shift in where the anxiety goes. Still, it's helped the people in the house be a little bit freer and less worried when we have things to do.

I'm still doing book reviews for Library Journal, but I may have to back off on those for a while, because it's just gotten a little bit overwhelming with everything else going on to have to read pre-pubbed books that I don't get to choose. It was a great time-filler when it was the only obligation I had, but now that my time for self-selected reading is reduced so much, having assignments isn't really making me feel all that stellar. I'm just trying to figure out how to do that, I think.

Graham's doing well. July was tough in the lab because a bunch of equipment went down and a lot of people went on vacation, so research progress really stagnated, which makes my goal-oriented partner very agitated, but things are getting back on track and his own vacation is coming up in a couple of weeks, along with a big family wedding, and it should be a good break for everyone. We've talked about going camping.

So I think that's pretty much the life update, totally non-philosophized.

I don't have a lot of insights, either for myself or anyone else lately. It's been a big week, beginning with a 48-hour work day and ending with the deflated feeling that always comes when I suddenly find myself no longer waiting for the phone to ring.

There's an interesting thing about my job, I think, in that it's simultaneously empowering and deeply humbling. Yes, I know what I've done was important. Yes, I know people see it that way, and yes, that feels good. But at the same time, there's a sense of complete uncertainty, which reflects the uncertainty felt by the people I work with, I think. It doesn't reflect it like a mirror--I know there's no sense in which my uncertainty and theirs are alike--but it reflects in the way you get a reflection off a just-barely-shiny surface. You can see what's going on, it's just dimmed. My uncertainty goes like this: did I help them? Could someone better have helped more? Am I good enough for this? Did I do the right thing? Did I listen well enough when she was crying, or did she feel brushed off? Was silence the right choice, or should I have said something? Is my intuition, which I have to rely on more than any of my training or experience, working well, or am I way off-base? Will it be ok, really, if I didn't do something someone else might have known to do?

I try, though, to tell myself the same thing I tell anyone who comes to me with that kind of uncertainty: this is normal. It's normal to feel this way. Nothing about this is predictable, and "normal" encompasses about a million possible circumstances that may or may not happen to anybody, but you are not broken. You're doing a good job. Your love is enough. Your presence alone is a lot. It's going to get, if not easier, at least differently hard, and you're going to get strong enough to handle it. You will level up. You will find your strength again. You will. It's ok to feel like you won't, but I promise, it won't be this way forever. It's ok to feel whatever you feel. Allow yourself to feel it, and allow yourself to believe that it's ok to feel it now at the same time you believe you don't have to feel it forever. It's ok.

I think that's a good bunch of things for everybody to remember, really: It's ok. You're not broken. Your strength can and will come back. Ride it out. The only way out is through, and the only way to make it easier is practice. Take your time. Find support and use it. It'll be ok.

"I want to be famous in the way a pulley is famous, or a buttonhole, not because it did anything spectacular,but because it never forgot what it could do."-Naomi Shihab Nye

I really, truly adore my job. I realized I haven't written about it since I've been actively working. Part of that, of course, is because of confidentiality. I'm very limited on what kind of things I can talk about, and as I'm trying to navigate where, exactly, the line is, I tend to find it easier not to share any of it.

Some things, though, have been so tremendous that I don't want to keep them to myself, you know? Now that I've had a few clients, it's less likely that by saying anything at all I'm saying something easily tied to a single person or family, so I can let a few of my thoughts into the world.

The moments that expand into all of time, here and back and forward, are dazzling. I catch them every once in a while, and the sensation of sheer immensity is almost physical. Whole families are both Now People and Someday People, and I get to see first moments of what their Someday looks like. I can't describe it any more than I could describe the universe, but it's so big.

When a family asks for a photo of me, or I see that they've included my name in something they're keeping to remember their birth, I know I've found my place.

It's tremendously strange to leave a family after that final visit and know our relationship is over. I cried the whole way home the first time. I find myself worrying or wondering about them, and I miss them. On one hand, maybe in part that's because I haven't had very many, but on the other I genuinely hope I don't lose that feeling entirely as time goes on.

A lot of the work I do in terms of preparation and skill-building has changed the way I see the world and the way I interact with my mind and heart. Some of that's been in evidence here, but there's a lot more going on that I haven't found ways to put into words. It's changing me, but it's also helping me in ways that sometimes feel kind of selfish. I use the tools I'm learning about to help me cope with other kinds of things, and as I build up my toolkit I'm endlessly surprised at the kinds of things that help me feel better, both physically, mentally, and emotionally, if I can just turn off my skeptic brain for long enough to give them a real attempt.

This is a halfway cheater post, because I wanted to get something out there without having to invest a whole lot of my just-recovering sense of wellness, but it's enough for now.